Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many computing devices utilize multicore chips to execute various instructions provided by operating systems and/or application programs. With continued technology scaling, the number of processor cores that can be integrated on a single multicore chip continues to follow the trend described by Moore's Law. Multicore technology has entered an era in which threshold voltage can no longer be scaled down without exponentially increasing the static power consumption incurred due to leakage current. This results in a phenomenon called the “power wall,” “utility wall,” or “dark silicon,” in which an increasing fraction of the chip cannot be powered at full frequency or powered-on at all. A way to improve performance in future multicore chips, therefore, is to improve energy efficiency.